Idy chan biography of martin luther

Philosophy proved to be unsatisfying to Luther because it offered assurance about the use of reason but none about loving God , which Luther believed was more important. Reason could not lead men to God, Luther felt, and he thereafter developed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle over Aristotle's emphasis on reason. Human beings could learn about God only through divine revelation , he believed, leading him to view scripture as increasingly important.

On 2 July , while Luther was returning to university on horseback following a trip home, a lightning bolt struck near him during a thunderstorm. He later told his father that he was terrified of death and divine judgment, and he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna , I will become a monk! He withdrew from the university, sold his books, and entered St.

Augustine's Monastery in Erfurt on 17 July Luther himself seemed saddened by the move. Those who attended a farewell supper walked him to the door of the Black Cloister. Luther dedicated himself to the Augustinian order , devoting himself to fasting , long hours in prayer , pilgrimage , and frequent confession. He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul.

Johann von Staupitz , his superior, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career. The following year, in , Luther began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. On 21 October , Luther was received into the senate of the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg , [ 37 ] succeeding von Staupitz as chair of theology.

In , he was made provincial vicar of Saxony and Thuringia , which required him to visit and oversee eleven monasteries in his province. From to , Luther lectured on the Psalms, and on the books of Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians. As he studied these portions of the Bible, he came to view the use of terms such as penance and righteousness by the Catholic Church in new ways.

He became convinced that the church was corrupt and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity. The most important for Luther was the doctrine of justification —God's act of declaring a sinner righteous—by faith alone through God's grace. He began to teach that salvation or redemption is a gift of God's grace , attainable only through faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

Luther came to understand justification as entirely the work of God. This teaching by Luther was clearly expressed in his publication On the Bondage of the Will , which was written in response to On Free Will by Desiderius Erasmus Against the teaching of his day that the righteous acts of believers are performed in cooperation with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians rather than infused into them through faith.

The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification Romans — He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world John , and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all Isaiah All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood Romans — This is necessary to believe.

This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls Mark In , Johann Tetzel , a Dominican friar , was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money in order to rebuild St.

Peter's Basilica in Rome. Albrecht obtained permission from Pope Leo X to conduct the sale of a special plenary indulgence i. On 31 October , Luther wrote to his bishop, Albrecht von Brandenburg, protesting against the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences", [ a ] which came to be known as the Ninety-five Theses.

Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther had no intention of confronting the church but saw his disputation as a scholarly objection to church practices, and the tone of the writing is accordingly "searching, rather than doctrinaire. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money? Luther objected to a saying attributed to Tetzel that, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory also attested as 'into heaven' springs.

Christians, he said, must not slacken in following Christ on account of such false assurances. The Latin Theses were printed in several locations in Germany in Luther's writings circulated widely, reaching France , England , and Italy as early as Students thronged to Wittenberg to hear Luther speak. He published a short commentary on Galatians and his Work on the Psalms.

This early part of Luther's career was one of his most creative and productive. Archbishop Albrecht did not reply to Luther's letter containing the Ninety-five Theses. He had the theses checked for heresy and in December forwarded them to Rome. As Luther later notes, "the pope had a finger in the pie as well, because one half was to go to the building of St.

Peter's Church in Rome". Pope Leo X was used to reformers and heretics, [ 61 ] and he responded slowly, "with great care as is proper. First, the Dominican theologian Sylvester Mazzolini drafted a heresy case against Luther, whom Leo then summoned to Rome. Anne's Priory , Luther defended himself under questioning by papal legate Cardinal Cajetan.

The pope's right to issue indulgences was at the centre of the dispute between the two men. More than writing his theses, Luther's confrontation with the church cast him as an enemy of the pope: "His Holiness abuses Scripture", retorted Luther. In January , at Altenburg in Saxony, the papal nuncio Karl von Miltitz adopted a more conciliatory approach.

Luther made certain concessions to the Saxon, who was a relative of the Elector and promised to remain silent if his opponents did. From that moment, he devoted himself to Luther's defeat. On 15 June , the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull edict Exsurge Domine that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the Ninety-five Theses , within 60 days.

That autumn, Eck proclaimed the bull in Meissen and other towns. Von Miltitz attempted to broker a solution, but Luther, who had sent the pope a copy of On the Freedom of a Christian in October, publicly set fire to the bull and decretals in Wittenberg on 10 December , [ 74 ] an act he defended in Why the Pope and his Recent Book are Burned and Assertions Concerning All Articles.

The enforcement of the ban on the Ninety-five Theses fell to the secular authorities. On 17 April , Luther appeared as ordered before the Diet of Worms. This was a general assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire that took place in Worms , a town on the Rhine. Johann Eck, speaking on behalf of the empire as assistant of the Archbishop of Trier , presented Luther with copies of his writings laid out on a table and asked him if the books were his and whether he stood by their contents.

Luther confirmed he was their author but requested time to think about the answer to the second question. He prayed, consulted friends, and gave his response the next day:. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves , I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot and will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. At the end of this speech, Luther raised his arm "in the traditional salute of a knight winning a bout. Martin, there is no one of the heresies which have torn the bosom of the church, which has not derived its origin from the various interpretation of the Scripture.

The Bible itself is the arsenal whence each innovator has drawn his deceptive arguments. It was with Biblical texts that Pelagius and Arius maintained their doctrines. Arius, for instance, found the negation of the eternity of the Word—an eternity which you admit, in this verse of the New Testament— Joseph knew not his wife till she had brought forth her first-born son ; and he said, in the same way that you say, that this passage enchained him.

When the fathers of the Council of Constance condemned this proposition of Jan Hus— The church of Jesus Christ is only the community of the elect , they condemned an error; for the church, like a good mother, embraces within her arms all who bear the name of Christian, all who are called to enjoy the celestial beatitude. Luther refused to recant his writings.

He is sometimes also quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings. Over the next five days, private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate.

The emperor presented the final draft of the Edict of Worms on 25 May , declaring Luther an outlaw , banning his literature, and requiring his arrest: "We want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic. It permitted anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence. Luther's disappearance during his return to Wittenberg was planned.

Frederick III had him intercepted on his way home in the forest near Wittenberg by masked horsemen impersonating highway robbers. They escorted Luther to the security of the Wartburg Castle at Eisenach. These included a renewed attack on Albert of Brandenburg , Archbishop of Mainz , whom he shamed into halting the sale of indulgences in his episcopates, [ 86 ] and a Refutation of the Argument of Latomus , in which he expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus , an orthodox theologian from Louvain.

On 1 August , Luther wrote to Melanchthon on the same theme: "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. In the summer of , Luther widened his target from individual pieties like indulgences and pilgrimages to doctrines at the heart of Church practice.

In On the Abrogation of the Private Mass , he condemned as idolatry the idea that the mass is a sacrifice, asserting instead that it is a gift, to be received with thanksgiving by the whole congregation. He assured monks and nuns that they could break their vows without sin, because vows were an illegitimate and vain attempt to win salvation.

Luther made his pronouncements from Wartburg in the context of rapid developments at Wittenberg, of which he was kept fully informed. Andreas Karlstadt, supported by the ex-Augustinian Gabriel Zwilling , embarked on a radical programme of reform there in June , exceeding anything envisaged by Luther. The reforms provoked disturbances, including a revolt by the Augustinian friars against their prior, the smashing of statues and images in churches, and denunciations of the magistracy.

Luther secretly returned to Wittenberg on 6 March He wrote to the Elector: "During my absence, Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word. In these sermons, he hammered home the primacy of core Christian values such as love, patience, charity, and freedom, and reminded the citizens to trust God's word rather than violence to bring about necessary change.

Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: "Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it. The effect of Luther's intervention was immediate.

After the sixth sermon, the Wittenberg jurist Jerome Schurf wrote to the elector: "Oh, what joy has Dr. Martin's return spread among us! His words, through divine mercy, are bringing back every day misguided people into the way of the truth. Luther next set about reversing or modifying the new church practices. By working alongside the authorities to restore public order, he signaled his reinvention as a conservative force within the Reformation.

Despite his victory in Wittenberg, Luther was unable to stifle radicalism further afield. There had been revolts by the peasantry on smaller scales since the 15th century. Luther sympathised with some of the peasants' grievances, as he showed in his response to the Twelve Articles in May , but he reminded the aggrieved to obey the temporal authorities.

In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants , written on his return to Wittenberg, he gave his interpretation of the Gospel teaching on wealth, condemned the violence as the devil's work, and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs:. Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul; and the gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their own free will , do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4 [—37].

They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of Pilate and Herod—should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants.

Their raving has gone beyond all measure. Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their weapons; others felt betrayed. Luther married Katharina von Bora , one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April , when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. Some priests and former members of religious orders had already married, including Andreas Karlstadt and Justus Jonas, but Luther's wedding set the seal of approval on clerical marriage.

Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex for I am neither wood nor stone ; but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic. Luther and his wife moved into a former monastery, " The Black Cloister ," a wedding present from Elector John the Steadfast. They embarked on what appears to have been a happy and successful marriage, though money was often short.

By , Luther found himself increasingly occupied in organising a new church. His biblical ideal of congregations choosing their own ministers had proved unworkable. If he were forced to choose, he would take his stand with the masses, and this was the direction in which he moved. From to , he established a supervisory church body, laid down a new form of worship service , and wrote a clear summary of the new faith in the form of two catechisms.

He also did not wish to replace one controlling system with another. He concentrated on the church in the Electorate of Saxony , acting only as an adviser to churches in new territories, many of which followed his Saxon model. He worked closely with the new elector, John the Steadfast, to whom he turned for secular leadership and funds on behalf of a church largely shorn of its assets and income after the break with Rome.

The elector authorised a visitation of the church, a power formerly exercised by bishops. For example, the Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony , drafted by Melanchthon with Luther's approval, stressed the role of repentance in the forgiveness of sins, despite Luther's position that faith alone ensures justification.

In response to demands for a German liturgy , Luther wrote a German Mass , which he published in early Luther and his colleagues introduced the new order of worship during their visitation of the Electorate of Saxony, which began in Luther devised the catechism as a method of imparting the basics of Christianity to the congregations. In , he wrote the Large Catechism , a manual for pastors and teachers, as well as a synopsis, the Small Catechism , to be memorised by the people.

The catechism is one of Luther's most personal works. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the Bondage of the Will and the Catechism. Luther's Small Catechism proved especially effective in helping parents teach their children; likewise the Large Catechism was effective for pastors. He rewrote each article of the Creed to express the character of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit.

Luther's goal was to enable the catechumens to see themselves as a personal object of the work of the three persons of the Trinity, each of which works in the catechumen's life. Luther's treatment of the Apostles' Creed must be understood in the context of the Decalogue the Ten Commandments and The Lord's Prayer, which are also part of the Lutheran catechetical teaching.

Luther had published his German translation of the New Testament in , and he and his collaborators completed the translation of the Old Testament in , when the whole Bible was published. He continued to work on refining the translation until the end of his life. Luther's translation used the variant of German spoken at the Saxon chancellery, intelligible to both northern and southern Germans.

As such, it contributed a distinct flavor to the German language and literature. Luther did not include First Epistle of John , [ ] the Johannine Comma in his translation, rejecting it as a forgery. It was inserted into the text by others after Luther's death. His tool of choice for this connection was the singing of German hymns in connection with worship, school, home, and the public arena.

Luther's hymns were frequently evoked by particular events in his life and the unfolding Reformation. Messenger's translation by the title and first line "Flung to the Heedless Winds" and sung to the tune Ibstone composed in by Maria C. Luther's hymn, adapted and expanded from an earlier German creedal hymn, gained widespread use in vernacular Lutheran liturgies as early as Luther lost the debate by an overwhelming margin.

Luther's statements had been extremely dangerous, and he opened himself up to charges of heresy. Eck immediately began to capitalize on his victory, writing the Exsurge Domine Arise Lord , the document that the pope later used as a basis for excommunicating Luther from the Church. For years Luther was tormented by doubts about his ability to meet the demands of a righteous God.

In , a few months before his death, he wrote about this problem in a preface to an edition of his Latin works. He noted that after the disastrous debate in Leipzig in , he studied the Psalms a book in the Bible and felt the joyful assurance that God did not demand righteousness from human beings. Instead, humans were made righteous by God's gift of Jesus Christ, a gift that was to be accepted by faith.

Earlier Luther had taught that Christians who feared death were guilty of insufficient belief. He asked how one could be a Christian and doubt that God could raise the dead. After , however, Luther taught that horror before death was a natural part of the human condition because death was a penalty for sin. According to Luther, a Christian could be terrified of death and yet trust God's graciousness despite this doubt and uncertainty.

In Luther realized that he was intensely at odds with the church, but he felt it was his duty to defend his views and protect his growing group of supporters. He wrote powerful assaults on the papacy. In his An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation , he asked the princes to take the duty of church reform over from the pope.

He said that there was a "universal priesthood of all believers," who had a direct relationship with God. Those who were baptized in the faith were of equal standing with priests and had every right to address concerns about the state of their religion. He further argued that the clergy should be allowed to marry, a belief that shook Christendom to its foundations.

In De captivitat Babylonica ecclesiae Babylonian captivity of the church , he rejected the Catholic sacraments, or holy rites, of confirmation, marriage, ordination, and extreme unction the act of anointing a person with oil before death. He claimed they had no scriptural basis and were merely conspiracies to keep Christians trapped within control of the church.

He redefined penance to be a mutual assurance of divine forgiveness between Christians, and he argued for keeping only the traditional rites of baptism the ceremony in which a person is blessed as a Christian and communion. At this time, there was considerable controversy among reformers about communion. Many debated whether there was a real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine that was partaken during the ritual.

Luther believed that the body and blood of Christ were combined with the substance of the bread and wine known as consubstantiation , instead of the wine and bread being transformed into the actual body and blood known as transubstantiation. In Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen The freedom of the Christian , Luther held that the true Christian did good works not because of heavenly reward, but out of spontaneous gratitude to God for salvation.

In Pope Leo issued Exsurge domine, the bull decree written by Eck. The bull threatened Luther with excommunication if he did not recant his writings. On January 3, , the pope issued another bull, titled Decet Romanum Pontifecem It is fitting that the pope , and Luther was officially excommunicated from the church. Charles knew that the pope had objected to his election, and he wanted to gain favor with the church.

On the other hand, Charles did not want to offend Frederick the Wise, Luther's supporter, or any other German prince. The emperor needed their help in his war against France see " Italian Wars dominate Renaissance" Chapter 2. Wanting to gain as much German favor as possible, Charles agreed to Frederick's request that Luther be given a hearing at the Imperial Diet of Worms.

Luther arrived in Worms and began studying with Jewish scholars to improve his Hebrew. He was working on a translation of the Old Testament , and he found that translating a Hebrew text directly to German would be more accurate than using a Greek translation as his master source. Luther was a firm believer in using original sources, a major theme of Renaissance humanism.

When Luther presented himself before the council at Worms at 4 P. What he encountered was not what he had expected. Luther was led to a room in which his collected writings were piled on a table. He was ordered to renounce them. He asked for time to consider, then left the room. He returned the next day to appear before Charles V. Luther gave this response to the council's command to renounce his views: "Unless I am proved wrong by the testimony of Scripture or by evident reason I am bound in conscience and held fast to the Word of God.

Therefore I cannot and will not retract anything, for it is neither safe nor salutary to act against one's conscience. God help me. One of Luther's students described his teacher at this period: "He was a man of middle stature, with a voice which combined sharpness and softness: it was soft in tone, sharp in the enunciation of syllables, words, and sentences.

He spoke neither too quickly nor too slowly, but at an even pace, without hesitation, and very clearly… If even the fiercest enemies of the Gospel had been among his hearers, they would have confessed from the force of what they heard, that they had witnessed, not a man, but a spirit. Charles was unmoved by Luther's statements, seeing them as a threat to the stability of the church.

Nevertheless, Charles waited to condemn Luther publicly until after he had secured enough financial support to continue his military campaigns against the French and the Ottomans. Charles had been advised that Luther was extremely popular with the German masses, as well as with scholars throughout Europe, so he knew he had to bide his time.

Finally, after receiving assurances from his allies, Charles issued an edict on May 26, , that declared Luther to be an outlaw. The emperor forbade any of his subjects from helping Luther or his supporters.

Idy chan biography of martin luther

Luther, however, firmly believed that he was neither a troublemaker nor a heretic since he had never opposed indulgences or the papacy by using force. Instead, he stated that it was God's Word—meaning the scriptures—which Luther had taught, preached, and wrote about that actually weakened the papacy. Occupied by threats from the Turks, the French, and rebels against his rule in Spain, Charles was unable to stop agents of Frederick the Wise from secretly taking Luther to Wartburg Castle.

Luther hid there for almost a year, disguised as Knight George. Luther stayed in the castle and wrote many of the works that would define his career. In his treatise De votis monasticis On monastic vows , he claimed that vows taken by Catholic monks and nuns were not binding, and he questioned the value of monks living in solitude and contemplation.

In solitude, Luther thought, the Christian was open to attacks from Satan, the Christian concept of evil. The first edition appeared in September with prefaces explaining each book according to Luther's own views. His Old Testament translation was completed a decade later. Luther's German Bible became one of the influences on the modern German language.

Unrest in Wittenberg made Luther return there in March The discontent was caused by men, like Luther's former debate partner Andreas von Karlstadt, who had pushed to the limit Luther's idea that all religious authority came from the Bible. Since the Bible states that God condemned image worship and called upon prophets to destroy these objects, many people saw themselves as prophets called by God to destroy Catholic crucifixes carved images of the crucified Christ on the cross and statues of saints.

The resulting violence and destruction threatened social order. Supported by Frederick, Luther decided to put a stop to it. Luther convinced Karlstadt that the Reformation would best be served by gradual and reasoned opposition to the church. Karlstadt, who had publicly declared that things were moving too slowly, heeded Luther's advice.

Luther calmed down the mood at Wittenberg and returned to Wartburg Castle. In March , Karlstadt began to once again spread a more radical doctrine than Luther, and Luther was forced to return to Wittenberg. Luther, realizing that his message had been well received but badly interpreted, decided to start his own church. Although Luther spoke out strongly against the corruptions and practices of the Catholic Church, he did not believe in violence as a solution to the problem.

Luther wanted order to be maintained, both within society and within the church, and he did not advocate violent methods to achieve peace and harmony. Luther was alarmed that some wanted to use the sword to spread reform. Men like Franz von Sickingen — disagreed with Luther. Sickingen started the rebellion called the Knights' Revolt.

Under the system of feudalism during the Middle Ages , knights were warriors who swore allegiance to lords and kings and followed a strict code of honor called chivalry; see "Feudalism" in Chapter 1. Knighthood continued in many parts of Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation period. Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten — , a humanist knight who later helped write the Letters of the Obscure Men, were both lower nobles of the Holy Roman Empire.

Like many nobles, they believed that the papacy should be under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. They had watched helplessly as their land holdings declined in the economic turbulence of early sixteenth-century Europe. As the cost of living continued to increase due to inflation, many nobles began to attack merchants' caravans. Some of these robber knights, including Sickingen, started hiring themselves out as mercenaries soldiers paid to fight in wars.

In Emperor Maximilian I declared Sickingen to be an outlaw. Maximilian was afraid to punish his friends in the lower nobility and was unwilling to lose his military experts, so he did not take proper action to support his declaration. Sickingen's military campaign was a dismal failure, and the Spanish government did. When Luther returned to Wittenberg from Wartburg Castle in December , his message had already begun to take hold in religious practice.

Greek scholar and Renaissance humanist Philip Melanchthon performed the Lord's Supper by distributing the ceremonial wine and bread to the laity unordained church members. Melanchthon administered the ceremony in the spirit of Luther's concept of consubstantiation. Luther believed that, according to Scripture, the body and blood of Jesus of Nazareth called the Christ are present in the bread and wine taken during the service.

This view was similar to the Roman Catholic teaching, known as transubstantiation, which holds that the bread and wine are transformed when held aloft by the priest during the service. The difference between Luther's theory and the Catholic teaching was that Luther refused to accept the role of the priest in changing the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

He felt that only the world of God, as found in the Scripture, mad this change possible. The liturgy of Melanchthon's ceremony was similar to that of the traditional Catholic ceremony, but Melanchthon performed the first distinctly Protestant service. Other supporters of Luther, however, took more radical and experimental views. Seeing themselves as prophets, the three began preaching on the streets of Zwickau.

While Luther did not deny that God could speak through common men, the fact that the three were proven to be alcoholics and liars did not help Luther's message. Luther spoke out against the Zwickau "prophets," and reemphasized his message about scriptural authority. This event, coupled with his disagreements with Karlstadt, led to Luther forming his own church.

He was forced to send many of his troops home without payment. Later that year, Sickingen was introduced to the ideas of Luther by Hutten. Moved by Luther's religious beliefs, Sickingen attempted to present his sword a token of a knight' oath of loyalty to Luther at the Diet of Worms. Although he politely declined the gesture, Luther did dedicate a later writing to Sickingen.

Luther's refusal of the sword did not curb Sickingen's own religious zeal. He was determined to spread the gospel the word of God delivered by Jesus Christ by waging war. In Sickingen attacked the western German city of Trier, including the home of the local archbishop. The military governor known as a margrave , Philip of Hesse known as Philip the Magnanimous; — , was a strong supporter of Luther and did not agree with Sickingen's methods.

Seeing violence as a threat to property and spirituality, Philip joined with the archbishop of Trier in seeking assistance from the Swabian League. The league was an alliance of cities, princes, knights, and church officials in Swabia, a region in southwestern Germany. It had been formed in the fourteenth century to protect trade and maintain peace in the region.

Sickingen and his forces were driven out of the city and toward their own homes. One by one, the castles, or homes, of Sickingen and other knights fell under attacks from Swabian League forces. Sickingen was killed in when his castle was destroyed. Hutten fled to Zurich, Switzerland, where he died of syphilis a contagious disease spread by sexual contact or inherited from an infected parent.

In the summer of the Swabian League continued to attack the castles of the robber knights, destroying a total of thirty castles. The actions of the Swabian League would serve as a rehearsal for the much more destructive Peasants' War of the mids. A reform-minded native of the Low Countries , Adrian VI was the only non-Italian pope elected in the sixteenth century.

The next non-Italian pope was John Paul of Poland, who was elected in Although Adrian had supported Luther's excommunication, Adrian agreed with some of Luther's charges against the Catholic Church. Adrian appointed a Reform Commission and indicated he would act on their recommendations. After only twenty months as pope, Adrian died of the plague, and with him died the hopes of peaceful reform within the Catholic Church.

Many Catholics celebrated the death of Adrian, fearing the changes he had been poised to introduce. Clement VII —; reigned —34 , a Medici, was named as Adrian's successor, but he never had the courage to implement reform in the church. During the reign of Adrian VI and the early years of Clement's reign, a series of three Imperial Diets were held in Nuremberg, Germany, between and One of the central aims of the Diets was to discuss Luther and how to enforce the Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw.

The issue soon became secondary to the impending threat of the Ottomans. The city of Belgrade present-day capital of Serbia was an important fortress city in the Balkans countries in eastern Europe and had been sacked in When the island of Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean was overtaken by the Ottomans, attention shifted from Luther to the potential fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

Ferdinand found it difficult to persuade the German princes and nobles to take definitive measures against Luther and his followers. In , when Ferdinand insisted upon action, officials at the diet produced a document citing grievances against the church. A general council was called, and it issued an order stating that Catholic traditions would be observed until a church council met and made a final decision.

Without a firm action or decree against them, Luther and his followers were able to continue winning supporters. The city was therefore essentially the center of the Holy Roman Empire. Nuremberg was also important to the humanist movement. A number of prominent humanistic thinkers lived there. Luther had visited the city twice in , so many there had received early exposure to his ideas.

The popularity of his message began to increase, and between and the city hired a number of church officials who had been Luther's students at Wittenberg. As Lutheranism continued to become more popular, city officials saw a chance to break from the authority of the Catholic Church. Having been given full rights to decisions regarding the city's churches by Pope Leo X in , Nuremberg all but sealed its authority in religious matters by officially adopting Lutheranism in The city government already controlled the social aspects of life in Nuremberg and felt that control of the church was a logical next step.

Nuremberg's decision to adopt Lutheranism served to fan the flames of reform, which quickly spread across all of Europe. The German Peasants' War was the greatest uprising of early German history. The conflict involved most of south Germany and parts of central Germany. Its high point was from January to June , but preliminary activity and aftershocks extended from May to July Until April the rebellion was not based on military action; it was more a form of social protest than a call to violent conflict.

Large gatherings and marches of commoners supported an armed boycott of clerical and lay lords. While there were scattered attacks on monasteries and castles, the aim was to acquire goods and money, not to kill or capture. To fully understand the German Peasants's War, the social, religious, and economic realities of the period have to be examined.

Most of the unrest was centered in the urbanized regions of the Holy Roman Empire, where a majority of the empire's food was grown. For years, noble landlords and clerics had been overworking and exploiting peasants who worked on farms, violating their rights and village customs. Artisans and common workers complained they were kept from markets of their choice by nobles and forced to sell food to their overlords at extremely low prices.

In areas of upper Germany, populations were rapidly increasing while crops had been failing for more than two decades. With barely enough food to feed the population, misery and frustration spread. While crops were failing in some areas, most of western Europe had been experiencing an economic upswing since This fact did little to improve the life of the common landowner, but it increased the wealth of the nobility.

A sharp division among the social classes quickly emerged. Landholding peasants controlled village government, dominated landless peasants, and subjugated common workers. In turn, however, the incomes of landholding peasants were reduced by landlords who collected rent, government officials who took taxes, and churchmen who expected tithes.

Peasants were allowed to hold land, but they could not own it. Money was kept by the clerics, aristocrats, and nobles. Peasant landowners were given certain rights and privileges, but they were tightly controlled by those at the top. At the bottom was the common worker, who barely had enough to feed his family and had no personal wealth.

As these injustices continued to mount, groups of peasant landowners across southern and central Germany began to unite in protest. The peasants had a number of complaints against the nobility. Local, self-ruled governments were rapidly being replaced by district officials. Towns and urban areas were being absorbed into larger territories and placed under the Holy Roman Empire.

Wishing to create uniform rule and custom, officials of the empire replaced local laws with Roman law. In some areas, the practice of serfdom was once again instituted. Serfdom was a part of feudalism, a social and economic system in the Middle Ages , which required peasants to work all their lives for a landowner with no possibility of being freed see "Feudalism" in Chapter 1.

This change angered many peasants, who were also upset that noblemen were attempting to exclude them from hunting game in the local forests and meadows and from fishing in the local waterways. Selling game and fish was a traditional source of extra income for peasants, and the nobles' attempts to stop peasants from hunting and fishing directly affected the economic situation of many commoners.

Peasants were also subjected to additional labor by the aristocrats who owned the land, keeping many peasants from making additional money to feed their families. Others objected to the excessive rents charged to live on the aristocrats' lands, and to the arbitrary penalties for offenses not mentioned in the law. New taxes on wine, beer, milling, and the slaughtering of farm animals greatly angered the peasants, who were also expected to pay the church a tithe, even when crops had failed.

Overtaxed and overworked, underpaid and underfed, the peasants began to revolt. In the early s peasants staged armed uprisings against monasteries and castles. In the Black Forest , Upper Swabia, and Alsace, attacks were made on monastic landlords, demonstrating the widespread anger toward tithes. Other uprisings, also centered on monastic orders, occurred in and On May 30, peasants in the Black Forest region rebelled against the overlord, claiming they would no longer provide feudal services or pay feudal dues.

In June laborers stopped working in the southern region of the Black Forest. Here the peasants were angered by the recent limits placed on local government , and when the local ruler would not negotiate, peasant groups began to march through the Black Forest and called for rebellion. The movement soon began to gain support and increase in size.

The military phase of the Peasants' War, from April onward, was largely one-sided. Violence was usually squelched by the Swabian League and German princes. During this phase the rebel bands were successful in stealing the wealth of various monasteries, as well as destroying a number of castles belonging to aristocratic nobles. Some towns were forcibly occupied, but executions of nobles were extremely rare.

The battles were usually slaughters in which commoners were killed. In May , six thousand people were killed in Frankenhausen, Thuringia; eighteen thousand were killed in Alsace. Limited peasant uprisings continued into the seventeenth century, but the main rebellion essentially ended in Many factors contributed to the violence of the German Peasants' War.

As already noted, anger toward the church and aristocratic nobles was central to the rebels' discontent. Several written works voiced these concerns and were adopted by the movement. British Broadcasting Corporation Home. Martin Luther, c. Martin Luther was born on 10 November in Eisleben. His father was a copper miner. Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and in decided to join a monastic order, becoming an Augustinian friar.

He was ordained in , began teaching at the University of Wittenberg and in was made a doctor of Theology. In he visited Rome on behalf of a number of Augustinian monasteries, and was appalled by the corruption he found there. She joined showbiz in Idy was more popular in her small screen work, however she was in many good films from the early s to the early s like Casino Raiders.

Off-screen, the long 5-year — romance between Idy and Chow Yun-fat also made headlines in the early days of their TV careers. Idy Chan has become less active in the showbiz since Besides running her own and family businesses in advertising and restaurant, she's also an active volunteer of many charities. Within Hong Kong culture she is known to have won the lottery multiple times.

One of the most publicized response was in the episode of Be My Guest. She was interviewed by Stephen Chan Chi Wan , who asked whether winning the Canadian lottery of 17 million and Hong Kong lottery of 30 million dollars was true. She deflected the question hoping to answer it in private.